Various events may take place during boot of a computer system. Often the user does not wish to view these events, especially if there are no failures. Sometimes, however, it would be desirable to view the boot log.
During boot, the system evolves from power on to discovery of memory, configuration and then launching of devices. The boot phase is complete once the “Boot Target,” typically an operating system (OS) has launched. In state of the art systems, the OS has no visibility into the boot log. Thus, once the system boot is complete, the boot log is unavailable.
Many things can trigger an event to be logged during initialization. For instance, suppose during initialization of a hardware device, or something else related to the motherboard, an error occurs. An error event is logged. Also, a warning or a temperature setting can trigger an event to be logged. These events are logged in a pre-boot event log area.
Users may wish to view the log to determine if there are any problems with the system. There is no current standards-based mechanism to view this log information today. Today, if errors occur, an administrator must go into the pre-boot set up environment and view the log. In a more complex server environment, there might be a remote agent that parses through the error log while the system is in pre-boot.